


Shatterdome Kids and the Kaiju Bones

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Series: Shatterdome Kids [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Science Buddies!, Team Hot Dads
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:10:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaiju vertebrae don't just get up and walk away... right? Book Two of the Shatterdome Kids Trilogy is now available at your local B. Dalton's!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It all began with [this fanart and Leez's amazing titles](http://daleconradsshuttershades.tumblr.com/post/62112651049/it-varys-iscawen-if-mako-and-chuck-ever-hung) (which I am yoinking almost verbatim this time around).

Vladivostok, Russia  
November 4, 2018  
1013 hours

“Max! Come here! _Max_!” This was a lousy way to start the vacation. The moment the Jumphawk’s door opened, his dog sprang out of his arms and ran across the helipad and into the Shatterdome. Chuck Hansen struggled out of his seat belts and went after Max, ignoring his father’s call. 

He couldn’t really blame Max. After almost a full day in the Jumphawk, Chuck was anxious to get some exercise, too. And Max was too well-behaved to pee in the helicopter, but Chuck knew he would search for the little patch of grass he’d been trained to use outside the Sydney Dome. Unfortunately, in the brief glimpse he got of Vladivostok before he was inside the Dome, Chuck hadn’t seen patches of grass. He hoped there weren’t any potted plants in the Shatterdome.

The Dome’s corridors were full of foot traffic, probably thanks to the aircraft carrier Chuck had spotted out in the harbour. He didn’t have time to wonder what it was unloading, though: when he rounded a bend, eyes still on the floor, he walked straight into what felt like a wall. 

He stumbled back and looked up. And up. Aleksis Kaidanovsky stared down at him. “Whoa,” Chuck said. “Sorry.” 

From somewhere beyond Kaidanovsky, Chuck heard a bark. “Max!” He darted around the Russian pilot and found his dog on his back in the middle of the corridor, stubby legs in the air, no bloody dignity at all, getting his belly scratched by Mako Mori. 

“What are you doing here?” Chuck demanded. It had been over a year since he’d seen Mako, and he couldn’t really think of any other way to greet her. He had just about given up on ever seeing her again, in fact. Her dad was Marshal Pentecost, the busiest man in the PPDC, and there weren’t many reasons for him to come to Sydney. 

“Helping with the specimen transfer,” she answered, patting Max a couple more times before she stood up. Mako hadn’t changed much--still tiny, with hair that looked like she cut it with a laser. Chuck clipped Max’s leash onto his collar, and they walked back toward the helipad. “You saw the Puerto San Jose fight?” 

“Of course.” That had been almost six months ago. Another kill for Gipsy Danger.

“It’s the most intact kaiju skeleton yet. They finally got the bones cleaned off, and Sensei and I brought them over on a carrier for Doctor Vreeden. She’s letting me catalog them. What are you doing here?”

“Good question,” Chuck said. “Dad told me, uh--” he checked his watch, and then remembered Vladivostok and Sydney were only one time zone apart--”yesterday, that we were going to use some of his leave time, and next thing I knew we were flying north.” 

Mako glanced up at him. “Vacationing in Vladivostok, in November?”

“Not even his worst idea,” Chuck grumbled. “You should ask him about our camping trip sometime.”

Back on the helipad, he saw his father speaking with Marshal Pentecost and both the Kaidanovskys. A regular Mark I reunion. “There you are,” Herc said. “Chuck, this is Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky, the pilots of Cherno Alpha.” 

“We’ve already met,” Aleksis rumbled, his accent thick. There may have been a trace of amusement in his eyes. Sasha, much smaller than her husband with bleached hair and vivid red lipstick, eyed Chuck like she was trying to decide whether he was a potential threat. 

“Herc and I have things to discuss,” said Marshal Pentecost, “and the Kaidanovskys have graciously agreed to spend the day with you two and show you around the Shatterdome.”

“So don’t be a pain in the neck,” Herc added. 

Chuck was quite certain, looking at the Kaidanovskys, that if he became anything close to a pain in the neck, he would experience more pain than that. He knew his father and the Marshal and the Kaidanovskys all went way back, and they all probably owed each other a few favors, but it was impossible to tell from the Cherno crew’s stony faces whether they were irritated at being saddled with two teenagers. 

“Are you hungry, children?” Sasha asked, leading the way into the Dome again.

“Could you not call us that?” Chuck said. He’d barely slept on the Jumphawk, and was more jet-lagged than anything else. 

“Are you hungry, civilians?” Sasha asked in exactly the same tone, and now he was sure she was having him on. 

“I could eat,” Mako said, giving Chuck a _Don’t push it_ look. He answered it with a _Who, me?_ look. 

Chuck hadn’t been expecting ripe avocados and mangos in the Vladivostok Dome’s canteen, but the abundance of potatoes and potato bread made him miss Sydney. At least there was butter and honey on every table. The Kaidanovskys used both to douse all their food. Mako arranged her meal very precisely on the segmented plate, and filled one section with honey, like a dipping sauce. 

“So what’s the itinerary?” Chuck asked as he buttered a second roll. “Can we see the hangar, or is that off-limits?”

“If that’s off-limits,” Mako added, “could we go into the city? I’d like to see Vladivostok.”

Sasha and Aleksis exchanged an unreadable glance. “It is National Unity Day,” Sasha said. “It would be best to avoid the city.”

Chuck glanced at Mako, who looked just as confused as he was. It dawned on him first. “Hang on,” he said, staring at the Kaidanovskys. “You two have saved Russia about a million times. Would people actually be pissed that your last name is Polish?” 

“Don’t ever try to pry old ideas out of Russian heads,” Aleksis said, cleaning his plate. “Anyway, it is less for our safety and more for yours.” 

“Point taken,” Mako said, and Chuck grudgingly accepted that if there were demonstrations in the streets, a ginger Aussie and a little Japanese girl probably wouldn’t be welcome.

“Where are we going, then?” he said as he fed his scraps to Max. 

“This is a vacation for you, yes?” Sasha said, collecting everyone’s trays. “We will go to the beach. You need to dress more warmly.”

“You wear shoes that have your name in the logo,” Aleksis observed to Chuck as they walked. “Is this so they will be returned to you if they are lost?”

“Romeo Blue has its own shoes,” Chuck replied, pleased that someone had finally asked. “You watch, big fella. In a few years they’ll call these Chuck Hansens instead.”

“What will they name after me?” Mako asked.

Chuck smirked down at her. “Something small and quiet.” Mako rolled her eyes, but Sasha Kaidanovsky performed an about-face, and Chuck’s sneakers squeaked on the deck as he stopped hard to avoid another collision. 

The blonde woman was eye to eye with him, and she spoke in a dangerously quiet voice. “The fastest breed of shark is the mako.” Then she turned on the ball of one foot like a dancer and resumed her brisk pace beside her husband. Mako followed, smiling. 

Chuck stood there and blinked after them for a moment, then hurried to catch up. 

Thirty minutes later, bundled in a ridiculously oversized parka, he looked out of the jeep and sighed. “Seriously?”

Vladivostok had some actual beaches, and closer to the Shatterdome there were stretches of jagged rocks that were pretty impressive, if not conventionally scenic. But the Kaidanovskys had driven them to a tiny little cove that was entirely covered in pieces of glass. The waves lapped at the shards, tumbling them gradually to frosted bluntness. Chuck stepped onto the so-called beach, and the glass crunched in a strangely musical way under his sneakers. The wind blasted his face, salt-smelling and below freezing.

Mako dashed past him, all the way to the water’s edge, and bent to examine the pieces. She yelped as the waves sloshed over her combat boots. “Have fun getting hypothermia!” Chuck called. “Watch your step, Max.” The dog pulled as far as the leash would let him, picked up a shard in his teeth, dropped it gently at Chuck’s feet, and went back to do it again. 

This was shaping up to be as pathetic as a Hansen camping trip, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

Vladivostok, Russia  
November 5, 2018  
0825 hours

After a night under a heavy wool blanket with Max on his feet, Chuck had almost warmed up again, but he was no less groggy or disgruntled. When Mako found him in the canteen with a cup of coffee and what might have been porridge, she asked if he wanted to help her with the cataloguing process. He almost said no, but what else was he going to do with his day?

PSJ-18 had come out of the Breach without tripping the Mariana Early Warning Sensors. It was one of the smallest Category IIIs on record, and the spike of its entry registered as normal Breach instability. Accordingly, it had never been given a codename, and the PPDC only knew it was coming when Hawaii’s scanners picked up a reading. 

If Chuck had to name it now, looking at the skull that nearly filled one of the small warehouses on the east side of the Dome, he’d call it Smaug. 

Kaiju were uniformly ugly creatures, with proportions that looked utterly wrong to human eyes, not to mention strange configurations of body parts. Chuck usually felt a little nauseated when he saw one, even just in footage. But the skull, without muscles or skin or eyes in its six sockets, nothing but grey bone, was almost beautiful. It had a sleek, snake-like shape, with three narrow ridges above the eye sockets. Each tooth was as long as his arm, and arranged in three crooked rows like a shark.

He stood back with Max as Mako held up her tablet and walked a slow circle all the way around the skull. The tablet’s camera took video, which was then converted to a three-dimensional wireframe and embedded in the K-Sci catalog entry for this specimen. The wireframes for each bone could also be linked up in a visualization app and matched with footage of PSJ-18 so the kaijuologists could study the structure in motion.

When she stepped back and tapped at the screen, Chuck moved forward to get a closer look. The bone’s surface was as smooth as glass, and he could actually see inside it a little ways--not quite translucent, but not completely opaque, either. He glanced back at Mako, who was still busy rendering the wireframe. Chuck reached up with his left hand and rapped his knuckles against one tooth. 

The skull rang like a gong. Chuck jerked his hand away and stumbled backward. Mako looked up from the tablet, mouth open like she was about to scold him. 

“The resonance is one of the things we’re researching,” said a new voice, in an accent that sounded a little like home, but mostly somewhere he couldn’t place. Chuck turned to see a tall woman with skin darker than the Marshal’s. She wore a spotless white coat cut like a stereotypical scientist’s labcoat, but it was made of wool, like much of the Vladivostok Shatterdome staff's outerwear. “We might be able to develop a Jaeger-mounted sonic weapon that can kill a kaiju without doing any collateral damage.”

“Aside from deafening everyone,” Chuck said. 

“It doesn’t have to be loud if we find the right frequency,” Mako protested. “Right, Doctor Vreeden?”

“Precisely. Tones too low for human hearing can still produce emotional, and even physical, reactions. For the kaiju we just need to hit the right note. In fact, we have a rib in the next room that is a perfect C-sharp. Would you like to hear it?” 

Chuck shrugged. “He wants to,” Mako told Vreeden. “He just has to shoot everything down before he can have any fun.” She led the way out of the skull room, and Chuck made a face at her back, then followed. 

The next room was twice as large as the one with the skull, and two dozen vertebrae, many with ribs still attached, were arranged in a loose circle. Doctor Vreeden went to one and struck it with the side of her fist. The dull sound echoed in the chamber. 

“I guess that’s pretty cool,” Chuck admitted, and glanced to Mako. He wondered if the C-sharp had produced an emotional reaction--her eyes were wide, mouth open, as close as Mako ever got to wigging out. She kept looking from her tablet to the bones and back. Max picked up on her anxiety and tugged on the leash until Chuck walked over. Then the dog helpfully sat on Mako’s foot.

“Doctor Vreeden,” Mako said softly, “I think there’s a problem.”

The kaijuologist looked at the tablet. “I don’t see one, Miss Mori. The wireframes all look fine.”

Mako took a deep breath--prepared, Chuck thought, to fully accept the blame for something--and said, “I catalogued twenty-six vertebrae yesterday.”

Chuck looked back at the bones and counted. “The second and fourth vertebrae are missing,” Mako went on, tapping on her tablet. “This one here was scorched from the I-19. You can see the rest of the charring on the fifth vertebrae. I don’t know how…” She clamped her mouth shut and breathed through her nose.

“Okay,” said Doctor Vreeden, putting a hand on Mako’s shoulder. “First things first. Don’t panic.” 

Chuck looked to the corners of the room. “Where are the security cams?” 

“There aren’t any in the Dome.” Doctor Vreeden looked like she’d eaten something bitter. 

_Of course not, because we’re not in the twenty-first century_. “Okay,” Chuck sighed. He picked Max up and scratched absently behind his ear. “What would it take to move one of those things? And how could it be concealed?” He thought of the enormous bins in the Sydney Dome for bedding laundry, the spare parts containers in the hangar. 

“Two people could roll one, though it wouldn’t be easy,” said Doctor Vreeden. “That overhead door leads outside. If they had a boat at the water’s edge, they could take them anywhere.” 

“Yeah, but why?”

“Trophies. Vengeful target practice. Homemade pharmaceuti--Mako, it isn’t your fault.” The girl was making herself smaller and smaller, shoulders ever more hunched. 

“We’ll sort out what happened,” Chuck vowed, looking her in the eye. Mako took a breath and nodded. This wasn’t something they could solve by building a robot, but he figured they’d both feel better if they actually did something. “Let’s go find the Kaidanovskys.”


	3. Chapter 3

Vladivostok, Russia  
November 5, 2018  
1830 hours

“You do still have twenty-four vertebrae and many other bones,” Sasha Kaidanovsky said, arms crossed over her chest. 

Doctor Vreeden had her hands in the gauntlets of a contained examination chamber, using a handheld rotary tool to sand off the exterior of PSJ-18’s knuckle. “I don’t need to explain to you, Rangers, how valuable each specimen is to our progress here. Two missing vertebrae could be the difference between successful experimentation and the loss of our funding.” Next to Chuck, Mako fidgeted.

“The bones are not in this Shatterdome,” Aleksis said. That much was certainly true: the Kaidanovskys and Chuck and Mako had looked everywhere. “Our jurisdiction ends here.”

“Your juris--” Vreeden swore in what must have been Sindebele, then took a deep breath, turned off the sander, and turned to face them. “Those remains are PPDC property, and our _jurisdiction_ extends to wherever they are. Not to mention the fact that someone is burglarizing this Dome. Have you spoken to the Marshal?” 

“The Marshal has much to do,” said Sasha. “We do not bother her with non-issues.”

“This should be an issue,” Mako blurted. “Doctor Vreeden is trying to improve the Jaeger program.”

“She’s doing more than most other people, anyway,” Chuck added.

“If only the world operated on a merit-based system,” Aleksis said, leaning back against a couple tall vats of neutralized Kaiju Blue.

“Oh, right, ‘life’s not fair, so why should we be’?” Chuck snapped at him.

Sasha interposed herself between him and Aleksis, and looked down her nose at Chuck. “Focus on killing kaiju before you try to start a revolution.” The Kaidanovskys marched out of the lab, side by side.

“That’s what I’m--ah, screw this. Sorry, Doctor Vreeden.”

Doctor Vreeden stared after the Rangers, then blew out a breath through her teeth. “Thank you for your assistance, Miss Mori, Mister Hansen. We’ll make do with what we have. Mako, I’d be very grateful if you could finish cataloguing the tail segments tomorrow." 

Mako didn’t seem to hear her, but Doctor Vreeden returned to sanding the bone. Chuck nudged Mako and they turned to leave, but then she pointed to where Aleksis had stood.

On the floor, like a coffee stain on a LOCCENT printout, was an arc of blue kaiju blood, marking the former home of a leaky vat. 

They split up in the corridor. Chuck found a smear of blue at the first corner and whistled, and Mako came running. “It’s still wet,” she said, poking it with one finger, which was disgusting but at least it was neutralized.

Chuck took a rag from his pocket and cleaned up the spot. No point letting anyone else follow the trail before they had a chance. “After curfew?” he said.

“After curfew,” Mako replied, and they parted ways to get ready.

At 2200 hours, just as his father was about to turn out the light, Chuck said, “I’m taking Max out to pee.” He put on his sneakers and his borrowed parka and grabbed the leash. Herc handed over his Shatterdome pass, for the exterior door. Out in the corridor, Chuck realized he didn’t know where Mako’s temporary quarters were. This could end real fast if he knocked on Marshal Pentecost’s door instead.

A moment later, while he was still trying to decide what to do, Mako walked up. Her coat dwarfed her. Without a word they went to the warehouse that held the skull, and their luma lamps gave it two long shadows as they headed for the small hatch next to the overhead door. Herc’s pass let them through, into the moonless and absurdly cold Siberian night. 

They waited in the shadows for the security patrol, and when it passed they climbed down the concrete foundation and crossed the few meters of sand beyond. Then came the rocks.

“All right, Max,” Chuck whispered when they had gone a ways into the tangle of jagged boulders. He held the kaiju blood-soaked rag out to the dog’s wrinkled face. Max sniffed it, then backed away and coughed. “That’s great. Big help you are.”

“He wasn’t bred for that,” Mako said, “and it doesn’t matter.” She held her gloved hand under the luma lamp, then shone it on the nearest rock: a smear of blue where she had reached out for support.

It was slow going. They kept the sound of the waves on their right and proceeded east away from the Dome. Some of the boulders were as big as Chuck, and he had to help Mako scale the more vertical ones; Max had to be carried inside his coat. They found a couple more patches of kaiju blood.

Chuck estimated they were a hundred meters or less from the place where the rocks thinned out into sand, when the sound began. At first it was a single low, intermittent tone, but he and Mako stopped to listen, and another joined it. Together they were dissonant, and they grew louder as the wind picked up until they became a wail. 

He felt his stomach turn over. “Let’s go back, yeah?” he whispered, but Mako pushed on, trying to find purchase on a smooth slab of rock. Chuck helped her up, then climbed over too, and he thought he saw something large and blue before he held up his one hand against the light that swung around to blind them. 

Mako cried, “Run!” and Chuck did, one arm cradling Max and the other out in front of him to find the rocks before he collided with them face-first. The wailing grew louder, and his stomach churned. HIs eyes burned with the afterimage of the light, and he had no idea where Mako was, or even if he was going the right way.

Chuck’s vision was clearing when his left foot fell into a crack and he pitched forward, barely catching himself before he hit the ground. Pain shot up his leg, and he cried out, and that was bad enough, but then he tried to move and found himself well and truly stuck. “Mako,” he hissed into the dark. The wailing had faded, and the light was gone, so he called for her, and a moment later she was at his side, shushing him and shining her luma lamp at his feet.

She grabbed his leg and they both pulled, and it popped out of the crack without a shoe. Chuck tried to take a step and stifled a yelp at the pain, so Mako put his arm over her shoulders and they felt their way forward in the dark, and finally the Shatterdome loomed before them. 

Outside the hatch they stopped to catch their breath, and gave each other completely false half-smiles, bluffing that they hadn’t just been scared completely witless. Chuck was shivering so hard that he needed three tries to scan the passcard, and then they stepped back into the warehouse to find their fathers waiting.

Mako lowered her head, face hidden under the hood of her coat. Marshal Pentecost asked her something in Japanese, and she replied in English: “I’m fine. Chuck hurt his foot.” 

Herc stepped forward. “Sit down,” he said softly, and Chuck and Max both did. His father prodded at his ankle, and Chuck jutted his chin, refusing to make a sound. “Not broken; probably not sprained,” Herc reported, then held out his hand. “You can walk. So walk.” 

Chuck got up without assistance and followed his father out of the warehouse. Outside the canteen Herc said, “Wait here,” and Chuck did, eyes fixed on a rust spot across the corridor. His father returned with two cups of hot chocolate, and they walked the rest of the way to their temporary quarters in silence.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Herc said when the door was shut and Chuck had limped over to his bunk. “The fact that I can’t trust you to take your dog for a piss without running off to do something stupid, or the fact that you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on. I can’t make you talk to me.”

“Nope,” Chuck said, letting the styrofoam cup warm his hands. Max was already snoring, nestled against his side.

Herc took a deep breath, eyes closed. “Does it have to do with the bones?” he asked. “Alice said some had gone missing.”

“ _Alice_?”

“Yeah, that’s her name.”

Chuck stared at his old man, feeling something burn in his gut. “Is that why we came here? You got a new girlfriend?”

“We came here for two reasons,” Herc said, very calmly. “One, the PPDC is restructuring and the Marshal needs me to take on some extra responsibilities.”

“Just you?” Chuck blew on the cocoa and took a sip; it scalded his tongue.

“You think your uncle has a head for administration?” Herc shot back. Chuck glanced away. “Yeah. Two, I wanted you and Mako to spend some time together, because who knows when we’re all gonna be in the same hemisphere again. I hoped that wouldn’t involve you two dragging each other into trouble.”

“Oh good, at least you didn’t assume it was all my idea.” He tried to imagine the conversation Mako and the Marshal were having at that moment, and could only assume it was an actual conversation. They had a way of speaking to each other, in either language, that Chuck sometimes envied--and they weren’t even blood relatives. Maybe that made it easier.

“Of course not, but you should have at least asked the Kaidanovskys to go with you. They’ve been very gracious to act as your guides.”

“Yeah, Dad, massive thanks for asking a pair of former prison guards to show us around. Red Sister and the Wookiee wouldn’t have been any help out there.”

“Out _where_ , doing _what_?” Chuck clamped his jaw shut, and Herc let out a sigh. “What if there’d been a kaiju attack? One like PSJ-18, where we didn’t know until it was right on top of us?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said through his teeth. “I guess we would have been eaten. And if that’s what you’re worried about, I suppose I should never leave the Shatterdome again, yeah?”

Herc’s expression told Chuck he wished that was possible. “Whatever it is you two are doing, sort it out quick, because we’re flying back to Sydney tomorrow afternoon.”

“What? Already? You can’t--” 

“I don’t see what other choice I have,” Herc said with that bloody hangdog look in his eyes. “If you insist on sneaking around behind my back, you can do it someplace where you won’t freeze to death if you get lost.” He knocked back the rest of his hot chocolate, turned off the light, and climbed into the top bunk. “Goodnight, Son.”

Sometime later, Chuck fell asleep angry and cold. He woke up cold and empty.


	4. Chapter 4

Vladivostok, Russia  
November 6, 2018  
0738 hours

“All right, look,” Chuck said as he stomped over in a pair of too-big combat boots and dropped onto the bench opposite the Kaidanovskys. They had cracked open the morning’s metharocin and were placing the pills on each other’s tongues, which was disgusting, or it should have been, but he didn’t dwell on the reason he found it so compelling. “I have T-minus eight hours to find those bones, and I’m going to do it, as long as they’re still somewhere on this continent. I don’t really care about your Dome politics, or whatever barter system you use here instead of basic human decency, but I know one thing.” He jerked his chin toward Mako, across the canteen, eating breakfast beside the Marshal with her head down. “Mako is going to carry this around forever as a personal failing if the bones don’t turn up. So if you care at all about her, you’ll help me.”

Sasha looked up at Aleksis, who gave a glacial shrug. “Fine,” Sasha said. “We will talk to Wassily.”

Conveniently, Wassily worked in the canteen. He had a greying handlebar moustache, and could have fit into Sasha’s drivesuit with room to spare. He knew things, the Kaidanovskys explained, and he could find things, so Chuck sat there for half an hour with his arms crossed over his chest, listening to the three of them speak Russian to each other. Mako wandered up after a little while, looking pale, and sat down beside him to pet Max. “You all right?” Chuck said softly.

Mako nodded, but she didn’t look certain. “Every Kaiju Blue sample gets neutralized before it goes to the lab, right?”

She knew that as well as he did. “Yeah. Why? You’re not gonna puke, are you?” Chuck made a show of leaning away from her, hoping for at least a smile.

She shook her head, as serious as the Marshal. “I’m just experiencing some abdominal pain. It doesn’t match up to the toxic reaction, though.”

Chuck poked his gut, but all it felt was heavy from the gruel he’d had for breakfast. Based on what he’d read, exposure to untreated Kaiju Blue just meant coughing a lot and then dying. He was about to tell her he didn’t have any symptoms when Sasha spoke up. “Why don’t we go down to Medical, Mako?”

“Oh, thank you, Ranger, but I need to go catalog the tail segments.”

“I’ll do it,” Chuck said, and held out one hand for her tablet. Mako looked at him doubtfully. “Come on, I know how it’s done. I’m gonna go crazy here if I can’t be useful today.”

“You’re not grounded, are you?”

Chuck wondered what grounded would even look like when he already lived in a Shatterdome. Then he realized Mako didn’t know he was leaving yet. “Uh, no. Just the usual Dad lecture. You know how it is.”

Mako thought about it a moment longer, then gave him the tablet. “Thanks, Chuck.” She patted Max one more time, then followed Sasha out of the canteen. When Chuck turned back, Aleksis and Wassily were both watching him.

“T-minus eight hours?” Aleksis said.

Chuck lifted his chin. “Yeah, comrades, so where are those bones?”

“Wassily has nothing to report.”

Great. That could mean anything. “So what have you been talking about this whole time?” Chuck demanded. “I thought he’s supposed to know things. Anyone stealing chunks of kaiju has to have help from inside the Dome. Maybe this guy should be our prime suspect.”

“Are you the bad cop now?” Aleksis asked.

“If you’re not gonna be.” Wassily muttered something, and Aleksis huffed with what might have been laughter. “ _What_?” Chuck snapped.

“маленький красный лев,” Wassily repeated, slowly.

Chuck rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” He got up, Mako’s tablet under his arm, and tugged on Max’s leash. “You gonna follow me around some more, big fella?” he called back to Aleksis on his way out, and by the time he reached the warehouses, the Ranger was two steps behind him.

Mako hadn’t told him how bloody long it would take to walk around the forty-eight narrow, prism-shaped sections of bone. Two hours later he had the last wireframe rendered, and he craned his neck to pop it. Aleksis finished a round of push-ups. “Are you done?”

“Almost.” Chuck stuck his head through the door to the next room, just for a quick count.

Then he counted again. Then he carefully set down Mako’s tablet, looped Max’s leash over the door handle, walked through the door, and kicked one of the twenty-one remaining vertebrae as hard as he could.

The borrowed boots were heavy, and the bone chimed. It probably wasn’t a perfect C-sharp, but there was something off about the sound, a muffled rattle. Chuck stepped back and walked a slow circle around the bone, as Aleksis moseyed in, drawn by the noise. “Is there a problem?”

“Come over here and give me a boost.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just come here.” Aleksis did, and Chuck found a side of the bone that would be relatively easy to scale. With a long-suffering look, the Ranger clasped his fingers and let Chuck use them as a step.

The top of the vertebra was gently curved, with a deep fracture running across its width. He shone his luma lamp down into it, and the light was both reflected and refracted by the smooth bone. “You got some gloves?” he called down to Aleksis, and the big man tossed him a pair of thick leather gloves lined with actual fur. Chuck could have fit both hands inside one of them, but they’d do for his purpose. He put them on and stuck both hands into the crack, found a sharp edge, and yanked.

The fragment of iron that he pried loose was the size of his boot sole and as thick as his thumb. Where it wasn’t gouged and scratched and corroded by Kaiju Blue, there was still some anodization. Chuck grinned despite himself. If he had to bring Mako more bad news, at least he’d have something to cheer her up.

He didn’t see her until that afternoon on the helipad. Chuck dropped the tablet off with Doctor Vreeden, and then spent a while in the machine shop, and then his father came to get him so they could pack. Bag over his shoulder, two discs of iron in his coat pocket, he walked out of the Vladivostok Shatterdome and into the vector of Mako Mori’s glare.

“What happened to your mouth?” Chuck asked before she could say anything. Herc walked over to speak with the Marshal, and Max plopped himself down at Mako’s feet.

Mako reached up to her lips, and some of the vivid crimson color there rubbed onto her fingers. “Oh. Sasha did that. She said--” She deepened her voice and adopted a passable Russian accent--” _You are a woman now_.”

Chuck had no idea why that made him uncomfortable. “What were you before?”

Mako shook her head and went back to looking furious. “When were you going to tell me you’re leaving?”

“I dunno. Now?” She hit him in the arm with one tiny, pointy fist. “Ow! What is with you? All right, Dad got pissed off that I left the Shatterdome, so now we’re going back to another Shatterdome so I can spend the rest of my life in a Shatterdome. I was just trying to sort out the stupid bones, okay? I didn’t want you to stress over it. But it turns out there wasn’t any point, because--”

He was about to tell her about the three vertebrae that had gone missing sometime in the last day, but the more he talked, the more miserable she looked. She started blinking rapidly, and Chuck realized he had never seen her cry. “Aw, jeez, Mako. Don’t…” He sighed, and pulled her into an awkward hug.

He knew she was small, but he’d had a couple growth spurts in the past year and she had not, and she barely came up to his chest. Mako turned her head to one side, and the iron in Chuck’s pocket clinked. “Oh, hey. I found something stuck in one of the bones.”

He fished out a disc, and Mako stepped back to look at it. “Inside the bone?” she echoed, turning it over in her hands.

“Stuck in a fracture. It’s not very thick, so it can’t be from Gipsy’s fist plating. Probably got torn off her torso or something.”

Mako stared at the scuffed cadet blue anodization, then wrapped her arms around Chuck again. He smiled, relieved to have done something right for a change.

Then, all over Vladivostok and the Shatterdome, sirens went off.

“A landfall alert?” Herc said as he and Pentecost walked toward the hangar. Jumphawk pilots dashed around the helipad as orders blasted from the outdoor speakers. Chuck had seen the roster that morning, and somewhere inside the Dome, the Kaidanovskys would be suiting up.

“Must be another small one,” the Marshal replied. “Didn’t trip the sensors--they probably spotted it off Nagasaki. Sorry, Herc, looks like your flight’s been delayed.” To Chuck and Mako he said, “Let’s go down to LOCCENT.”

“Sensei, wait,” Mako said, and Pentecost did. “Could we watch from somewhere else this time?”

The Marshal tiled his head to one side, and Mako nodded toward the only Jumphawk that wasn’t getting ready to scramble. Chuck stared. She was a genius.

Herc’s brow was creased, and he had just opened his mouth to tell Mako that wouldn’t be the best idea when the Marshal quietly said, “You _did_ just fuel up.”

Chuck’s dad looked at Pentecost. Pentecost raised one eyebrow. Herc held up both hands in defeat, but there was no hiding his grin. “Go strap in,” he said, and Chuck and Mako ran.


End file.
